On wednesday september 7th ITQ organized a “vSphere 5 What’s new” session. The session was held in the Van der Valk hotel en Breukelen and was attended by approximately 40 people.
In this session Paul Geerlings introduced some new features like the “monster VMs”, Improvements in networking and changes to the available ESX versions. Then Dennis introduced us to some awesome new storage features. His talk was mainly about storage DRS and how it can help you simplify the administration of datastores and improve performance at the same time.
After the break I started out by talking about some new technologies which were introduced at the VMworld in Las Vegas: VXLAN, AppBlast and Octopus.
Then I went on and introduced the audience to the brand new vCenter Server Appliance which is a virtual appliance based on SLES 11. This appliance gives us the ability to quickly deploy vCenter without going through the hassle of installing an OS and a DB. It even delivers all the component needed to start using Vmware Auto deploy.
After a demo of the vCSA and Auto deploy (which went rather well considering it was a demo) I quickly introduced some new features in VMware SRM 5 namely: Host based replication and more flexible startup sequence possibilities.
At the end of the session Paul had the honor to explain the new licensing which basically comes down to this: Each sockets license you buy has no restriction on number of cores but comes with a vRAM entitlement. The entitlement is added to the vRAM pool so it can be used anywhere in your vSphere environment instead of being tied to one socket. If you run out of vRAM entitlement you have to purchase additional sockets licenses.
Thanks again to everybody who attended this session. I hope you had as much fun being there as I did.
By the way: SRM 5, View 5 and Workstation 8 are available for download as of today.
